Eskimono

Iggy by Anthony Stern.

To all followers of the cult of Iggy: a happy new year!

The Church received a nice mail from Anthony Stern last week:

I see that you have continued to update your website and that the cult
of Iggy is snowballing. Although my Iggy photos were shown on City Wakes
website nobody was interested in buying the framed prints.

If you are still looking for a belated Xmas present: Anthony’s Iggy
pictures are on sale, signed, numbered and framed: £225 for the
Triptychs, individual pictures for £175 (plus postage). For more info
please contact Anthony
Stern Glass. (The Church is not affiliated with or endorsed by this
company.)

Another message came from Mark Blake, author of the Pink Floyd biography
Pigs Might Fly:

Good luck with the Iggy hunt. I spoke to Ant Stern and Jeff Dexter again
last week. They're no nearer to finding her than they were before. I
think it's funny that nobody even knew her real name.

For that matter we don’t even know if she was Eskimaux or
not.

My good old encyclopaedia Brittanica
divides the people that we commonly describe as Eskimo in two
categories: Eurasian and Western Arctic people. The Western Arctic
people are the Eskimo (including Inuit and Yupiit) and the Aleuts who
originate from North America, Greenland and part of Siberia. Amongst the
Eurasian arctic people are the Sami (or Lapps) from northern Fennoscandia
and several other cultures dispersed over the Ural Mountains and Siberia.

According to the Narwhal
Inuit Art Education Foundation there are no Inuit currently living
in England (confirmed to the Church by mail). Is it more logical to
believe that Iggy’s roots originate from Europe rather than America or
Siberia? In that case Iggy, the Eskimo really had to be nicknamed Iggy,
the Lapp by her contemporaries.

Translating these into politically correct terms The Church of Iggy the
Inuit really had to be baptised the Holy Church of Iggy the Sami to
begin with.

As Mark Blake stated above, we don’t know if Iggy was her real name.
Iggy could be an alias or perhaps an anglisized version of a foreign
name.

If she has Sami roots her name could be Ing,
originally meaning progenitor, ancestor, leader – which of course she is
for the Church – Ingegerd
or one of the many variants such as Inge, Ingine, Yngva, Ingar, Iŋgir…
The more popular Ingrid also has its roots in the Nordic countries and
this could have easily been shortened to Iggy by her relatives or
friends.

Greenland.

The problem is that not a lot of Sami people have the so-called Inuit
look Iggy is famous for. There is however a part of Europe (although
geographically it belongs to North America) that was originally
populated by Inuit people and was later on colonised by Iceland, Norway
and Denmark. The Church is of course referring to Greenland.

The Inuit are believed to have crossed from North America to northwest
Greenland, the world's largest island, between 4000 B.C. and A.D. 1000.
Greenland was colonized in 985–986 by Eric the Red. The Norse
settlements declined in the 14th century, however, mainly as a result of
a cooling in Greenland's climate, and in the 15th century they became
extinct. In 1721, Greenland was recolonized by the Royal Greenland
Trading Company of Denmark. (taken from Infoplease)

In November of last year 3 out of 4 Greenlandic voted yes on a referendum
that could eventually lead to the complete independence of the country.
About 88% of the Greenland population has Inuit(-mixed) roots. The
following link
shows a (slow-loading) picture of premier Hans Enoksen voting for
Self-Governance in Greenland with 5 year old Pipaluk Petersen (added
here to show the Inuit characteristics).

So Iggy’s ancestors could have come from Greenland.

Well perhaps... at least one other Iggy enthusiast
believes she is not Inuit at all, but (partly) Japanese, probably
belonging to the Ainu
people of Hokkaidō (who had their own language and were maybe the first
settlers on America). Iggy could then be a nickname for Igumi.

And aside from that there might be a very slim chance that Iggy hides
behind the Philippine Maria Ignacia as another author from a
Floydian biography has whispered in the Church's confessional box.

Update: the above post is somewhat redundant as Iggy Rose's
mother came from the Himalayas: Little
old lady from London-by-the-SeaUpdate March 2018:
Iggy's mother did not live in the Himalaya's, but at the Lushai Hills, a
mountain range in Mizoram and Tripura, India.